The founders of Twitter look set to vastly increase their already impressive wealth after they announced that the company is preparing to float on the stock market.

After years of speculation, the social networking site, which has more than 200 million users worldwide, will finally follow in the footsteps of the likes of Facebook by filing an IPO.

The move could take the collective wealth of Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, who co-founded the site back in March 2006, from its estimated $3billion to more than four times that.

The company announced on Thursday that it had filed paperwork with the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in its first step toward an initial public offering.

It is expected to debut at a valuation of between $14 billion and $20 billion. The move is one of the most highly anticipated IPOs in tech history with Twitter the last of the major social networking sites to go public.

THE TWEET LIFE: HOW TWITTER TRIO ARE ALREADY WORTH A MINT

Evan Williams

Age: 41

Net worth: $1 – $2billion

Potential worth: $8billion

CNN Money estimated that he has a 30 to 35 per cent share in the company. His firms have also founded Blogger and Medium.

Williams, a vegetarian, lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife Sara Morishige and the pair have two children.

Role: Co-founder and former Chief Executive of Twitter

Jack Dorsey

Age: 36

Net worth: $1.1billion

Potential worth: £3.1billion

Mr Dorsey sent the first ever tweet in March 2006 and is thought to own a 10 per cent share in the company.

Although he made his name with Twitter, most of his current fortune is thought to have been amassed through his estimated 25 per cent stake in mobile payment start up Square.

He is a certified masseur and lives in San Francisco.

Role: Executive chairman at Twitter, CEO at Square

Biz Stone

Age: 39

Net worth: Thought to be around $200million

Potential worth: Around $2billion

As well as Twitter, Stone, full name Christopher Isaac, helped to create and launch Xanga, Blogger, Odeo and Medium.

He is also CEO of a 2012 start-up called Jelly Industries, thought to be a mobile app.

He has written two books on blogging and made his directorial debut as part of Project Imaginat10n with Ron Howard.

Role: Co-inventor and co-founder of Twitter, CEO of Jelly Industries

It comes after Facebook floated on the US stock market in May 2012 for $104 billion (£66.2 billion) and, despite seeing an initial slump in shares, has since had a resurgence.

It is thought that like Facebook, Twitter bosses’ hands were forced by the Jobs Act which requires a U.S firm to file an IPO once it has reached 2,000 investors.

Although the IPO was filed confidentially – the law allows companies with less than $1billion revenue in its last financial year to do so – the company was quick to announce its intentions, naturally, with a tweet last night.

The confidentiality should help Twitter avoid the media scrutiny that surrounded Facebook’s decision to float.

The company has been ramping up its advertising products and working to boost ad revenue in preparation.

But it is still small in comparison to Facebook, which saw its highly anticipated IPO implode last year amid worries about its ability to grow mobile ad revenue.

Under the law, Twitter’s financial statements and other sensitive information contained in the IPO filing must become publicly available at least 21 days before company’s executives begin traveling around the country to meet with potential investors – a process known as a ‘road show’.

The decision to float the company is likely to see the company’s founders Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone stand to gain huge financial windfalls.

The site was founded in March 2006 but has become one of the world’s most popular social networking sites over the past seven years.

Dorsey introduced the world to the site by sending out the first ever tweet which read: ‘Just setting up my twttr’.

The 36-year-old is also the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company. He is reportedly living in a $10 million home in San Francisco and dating his longtime girlfriend, Kate Greer.

Dorsey’s interest in programming began at the ripe age of eight, according to a 2011 Vanity Fair article. He came up with the idea for Twitter in his 20s and shared it with Biz Stone and Evan Williams, two of his bosses at San Francisco software startup Odeo.

Williams embraced the idea and made Dorsey, who was 29 at the time, the founding CEO of the new company.

Stone, 39, and Williams, 41, have also helped create Blogger, Medium, and a host of other Internet ventures.

Dorsey is currently thought to be worth around $1.1billion but the floatation could see that figure increase threefold.

Biz Stone’s wealth could jump from $200million to $2billion, while Evan Williams, thought to be the richest of the three, could see his personal fortune jump from $2billion to $8billion.

Others that stand to gain from Twitter going public include early investors Union Square Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Spark Capital, as well as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway and Naval Ravikant.

The company delivered the news of its planned IPO Thursday in a tweet sent out at 5 p.m. The tweet read, ‘We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.’

That tweet was followed up by a second post: ‘Now, back to work.’

Bloomberg reports that Goldman Sachs is expected to be the lead underwriter of the offering.

Twitter had been working to boost ad revenue in preparation for the move.

It recently acquired MoPub, a mobile advertising company that has a $100 million annual revenue run rate, and in July, the company hired a number of people with IPO experience.

EMarketer estimated in March that Twitter’s revenue will be $582 million this year and close to $1 billion in 2014.

Twitter will be hoping to fare better than when Facebook floated last year, a move which was initially a flop.

Facebook priced its IPO in May 2012 at $38 per share, but the stock fell almost immediately, trading well below its launch price.

The stock continued to fall over the next couple months, trading at $22 per share by September 2012.

A year later, however, share prices have made a full recovery.

By the time the markets closed Thursday, Facebook’s stock was priced at $44 per share.

Twitter’s CEO is Dick Costolo, the company’s former Chief Operating Officer – a position now held by Rowghani Ali.

A MULTI-BILLION POUND BUSINESS THAT STARTED WITH A 140 CHARACTER IDEA

Twitter was created back in March 2006 but its popularity soon went through the roof with more than 500 million users registered worldwide as of last year and more than 500 million tweets sent a day. Here is a list of interesting facts about what makes Twitter a global phenomenon:

It took three years, two months and one day for the first billion Tweets to be sent on the platform. The same number are now sent every 48 hours.

The hashtag feature, first proposed by a user, first appeared on Twitter in August 2007.

There are more than 200 million monthly active users around the world, and around 10 million users in the UK alone.

UK Twitter users are very mobile – 80 per cent of UK users are active on mobile, compared to 60 per cent globally.

The re-tweet feature was launched in August 2009, more than three years after the platform was founded.

40 per cent of active users simply consume content on Twitter, rather than send tweets themselves.

There are more than 400 million monthly unique visitors to twitter.com.

Twitter supports more than 35 different languages.

Twitter was localised in right-to-left languages Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu, increasing the number of localised languages to 28, on March 6, 2012.

70 per cent of accounts are outside the United States.

The most re-tweeted Tweet to date was President Barack Obama’s message, “Four more years”, after he won the US presidential election on November 6, 2012. It was re-tweeted more than 811,000 times.

On March 25, 2012, James Cameron sent a Tweet from the ocean’s deepest point, the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific.

The first Tweet was sent in San Francisco, California, by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey on March 21, 2006.

Pop star Justin Bieber has the most followers with around 44.5 million.

Singer Adele is the Briton with the most followers, with more than 17.5 million.

Twitter has 1,500 employees at its headquarters in San Francisco, while a further 2,000 work in offices around the world.

Pop superstar Cher clashed with her Twitter.com followers on Tuesday (08May12) after ranting about U.S. presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and slamming him as “racist” and “homophobic”.

Romney is expected to be named the official Republican Party presidential candidate at its convention in August (12), pitting him against incumbent President Barack Obama for the 2012 election.

But Cher has made it clear she won’t be voting for the Republican when Americans go to the polls in November (12) because she strongly disagrees with his conservative views on immigration, same-sex marriage and abortion.

She tweeted, “If Romney gets elected I don’t know if i can breathe same air as Him & his Right Wing Racist Homophobic Women Hating Tea Bagger Masters (sic).”

Her Twitter attack caused tension with some of her fans online.

When one follower called her an “irrational atten. (attention) w**re (sic)”, Cher fired back, “Actually I’m Not & if u Dislike Me SO.. Get Off My Site it Cant B Fun 4 U (sic)!”

Another commented, “Ouch!!! Bet you just lost half of your fans”, prompting Cher to reply, “Thank God I Got the half that thinks!”

And she remained defiant as she was bombarded with angry responses to her outspoken views, adding: “God its (sic) hysterical what crawls out of woodwork if someone speaks their mind! Obviously i don’t care what u think so knock yourselves out (sic).”

MORE FROM CHER’S TWITTER:

CHER: God its hysterical what crawls out of woodwork if someone speaks their mind! Obviously i don’t care what u think so knock yourselves out

CHER: (Cher’s reply) Thank God I Got the half that thinks ! RT…Twitter Message To Cher: Ouch!!! Bet you just lost half of your fans